When receiving or opening software, a client computer can become vulnerable to attack by malicious software. Malicious software, or “malware,” refers to viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms, bots, and the like. As malware has caused much harm in the recent past, much effort has been invested developing sophisticated anti-malware applications to protect against malware.
Anti-malware applications need to check (scan) every suspicious file, and hence the application can consume a significant proportion of the host computer's resources. However, because of the severity of the damage that malware can cause, the user has conventionally had little choice other than to divert resources for operating the anti-malware application away from the other operating applications.
The drain on the resources of the computer is not limited to the period of time immediately following a new software file's introduction to the computer, when the software is initially scanned. Resources are needed for subsequent scans of the file, which is rescanned because anti-malware applications are regularly updated to enable them to protect against newly-discovered malware. That is, files that an anti-malware application initially deemed free of malware may later be determined to contain malware after being scanned by the updated anti-malware application. Thus, resources for multiple scans are needed to improve the quality of the protection against malware.
Unfortunately, malware is continually growing more “sophisticated,” and thus the anti-malware applications require more resources to operate effectively. Accordingly, it would be desirable under the present circumstances to operate anti-malware applications as they become more sophisticated without continually increasing the demands on a client computer's resources.